Sunday, April 15, 2012

Leave it to the FCC to stick it to nefarious corporate overreaching: USA Today reports the FCC just slammed Google with a $25,000 fine obstructing an investigation into collecting private information about American Wi-Fi networks. That'll stop 'em!

Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Pebble smart watch – a clever little device that connects to your iPhone or Android device and, oddly enough, tells the time – was a twinkle in the eye of founder Eric Migicovsky just a few weeks ago. Now the product has reached $2 million in funding. And if that weren’t enough, InPulse, the company that makes the Pebble, only ever asked for $100,000 over the course of the entire project.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Nokia has released some details on its latest sales figures for its new Lumia range of Windows Phone devices, and the company has sold a total of two million Lumia Windows Phone smartphones in quarter one of 2012.

Nokia also announced some preliminary information ahead of the release of its quarter one financial results, and it looks like Nokia will make a loss of around 3 percent below their ‘break even’ figures.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Last week I mentioned that some early details on the latest grand challenge hosted by DARPA had surfaced. Those early details outlined a robotics contest that had some complicated steps that had to be completed to win. The official details on the DARPA Robotics Challenge have now been posted, and it still seems like a complicated task.

The huge bonus handed to Tim Cook when he took over at the helm of Apple not only made him the best-paid boss of a US public company last year, it meant he earned more than the nine next most generously remunerated chief executives combined.

Mr Cook was given $376.2m (£237m) in Apple shares last August as what the iPhone-maker called a "promotion and retention award".

A preliminary analysis of pay data from regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that the top 100 chief executives were paid $2.1bn in total last year, up 2 per cent on 2010.

While we wait to hear Kaz Hirai’s new plan for Sony, the news is getting worse before it gets better. The company just announced new projections that are more than double the net loss it predicted in February for the fiscal year 2011, to the tune of $6.4 billion. The reason? According to Reuters, it’s additional tax expenses that are causing the pain, as Sony says it’s “due to the establishment of valuation allowances against